Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in general, have been increasingly gaining popularity and attention in both the commercial and nonprofit sectors. They have particularly been envisioned to be of critical importance in military and disaster zones for many purposes, including surveying, relief, and combat.
However, drones are now deemed to have moved beyond just being data collection tools to intelligent devices that may be used as computation infrastructure in target areas. This may involve running, tracking, planning, surveying, and control activities in a diverse range of domains, including but not limited to traffic management, disaster management, relief, and agriculture surveillance. Since modern UAVs have considerable storage capacity and can support a decent payload, a strong enough onboard computer (comparable to a Raspberry Pi) can be easily attached to imbibe them with sufficient computing power. Therefore, every UAV acts as a compute node, specifically, an edge computing node.
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